Eleni Kyramargiou
On October 2, 1924, in compliance with the terms of the Lausanne Treaty, the residents of Sinasos/Mustafapaşa in Central Anatolia (in the Ürgüp District of Nevşehir Province today) left their homes for Greece. As refugees displaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, they were fully aware that neither they nor their families would be allowed to return. Their exodus was not an abrupt, but rather a long, coordinated farewell. The residents of Sinasos had known they would have to leave since the signing of the population exchange treaty; what remained was to learn the details and the date of their departure.
Although their overall story is typical of the population exchange process, one detail sets Sinasos apart. Before their departure, the residents of Sinasos, supported by their local council, photographed their houses and community. Τhese photographs travelled with them, or even ahead of them, first to Istanbul and then, finally, to Athens where the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] was published at the end of 1924 (Fig. 1). This album was a conscious attempt to preserve the past, namely the history, the traditions, and the collective memory of a community which no longer exists. The photographs from ‘there’ and the short texts written by the refugees in their new ‘here’ constitute an endeavour to reconstruct their old communal life, from its history and architecture to the local dialect and the songs they used to sing (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1. Christos Panagos, The cover of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] (private collection)

Fig. 2. Christos Panagos, The first page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] displaying a general view of Sinasos (private collection)
This album is more than just a book. For the people of Sinasos who experienced the exodus, it is a living piece of home, while for their descendants it serves as a way to learn about their past and place of origin. For historians, the album is valuable historical evidence, not only for the information it provides, but also for the insight it offers into the historical perception and perspective of its creators, who sought to document the history of a place and community that would soon cease to exist in its original form. It is a precious object despite the fact that it did not actually come from the native land of Sinassos, but was instead made ‘here’ in order to preserve the history of a ‘there’ that had to be left behind, highlighting the multiple dimensions an object can acquire over the course of its life.

Fig. 3. Christos Panagos, One page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] with photographs on the right hand and texts on the left.
The album created by the first generation of refugees from Sinassos, was one of the objects encountered during a research on the material dimensions of the population exchange experience. The initial questions were simple: what does one take in a moment of expulsion? What objects were considered valuable, useful, or symbolically important? What became of them over time? And if one can still identify these objects, what meaning do they hold for their current owners?
For the research team, the album initiated a broader investigation into the objects that Christian refugees chose to take with them at the moment of flight. More specifically: What objects did the non-exchangeable refugees who arrived in Greece after August 1922 bring with them? Did they choose objects objectively valuable, subjectively precious, or useful and practical? How many of these objects have survived to this day? When the project started, the research team believed these objects would help reconstruct the process of refugee integration into the novel setting in Greece. Eventually, it was realized that these objects have a second life: they acquire multiple meanings and generate diverse sentiments in the hands of their current owners (Kopytoff 1986, p. 64).
Clothes and personal items, jewellery and valuables, trade tools and religious icons, property deeds, documents, and letters were among the most common things that the displaced chose carry. In hastly packed bundles, they combined practical items for daily use with objects of material and emotional significance; the precious and the quotidian, side by side. To encapsulate and disseminate the findings of the research project Objects in Motion, it was decided that a digital exhibition would be the ideal medium. These objects along with the stories of both their original and current owners, highlight the intersection mobility history and material culture. As Renée Hirschon noted, these objects and the memories they carry, as well as the use of memory itself over the past 100 years, have built ‘memory bridges’ for the owners’ descendants. These bridges constructed across three generations, represent an effort to maintain continuity through time, especially when the place of origin has been irrevocably lost and memory has become ‘their most valuable property’ (Hirschon 1989, p. 15).
For the research team, Objects in Motion raised many intriguing questions on an array of issues: How do individuals construct multiple identities? How are personal recollections and, in the end, personal history shaped through second hand accounts?, More generally, how are personal narratives formed and how do they influence the big picture and the broader narrative? What symbolic meanings are attached to the ancestral house, and which memories endure across generations? Conversely, what traumas emerge from forced displacement and resettlement in unfamiliar homes? Many informants have reconstructed their ‘refugee identity’ repositioning themselves and their families within historical narratives, spanning the past, present and, possibly, the future. Kristina Gedgaudaitė describes this process as ‘viewing memory as a portable toolkit’ aptly characterizing it as ‘portable memory’ (Gedgaudaité 2021, p. 219).
These objects, alongside the stories and memories they carry, are fragments from a long and arduous population movement. This movement concluded a decade of military conflict in the Balkans, defined the national borders of Greece and Turkey, and shaped the societies of both countries. Simultaneously, thousands of people and objects crossed the Aegean in the opposite direction, as Muslim populations left Greece under the Lausanne Treaty. Monumental as it was, this was neither the first nor the last time refugees crossed the Aegean Sea. Objects do not speak for themselves. Yet they stand as resilient markers of historical moments, reminding us that even in times of crisis people make choices: they chose what is valuable, what they believe will help them face the unknown, and what they hope will carry their memories into the future.
References
Kristina Gedgaudaitė, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture. An Itinerary, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.







